Prof. Dr. Anne-Julia Zwierlein's areas of expertise are early modern and Victorian literature and culture, with some excursions into contemporary British writing. Her doctoral dissertation dealt with (anti-)colonial and imperial rewritings of John Milton's epics during the long eighteenth century, and her habilitation ('second book') examines cultural discourses about physiological transformation, intellectual formation and education in Victorian 'novels of formation' and science writing.
With a pronounced interest in links between literary production and extra-literary discursive formations and practices, her research has contributed to the fields of science and literature, medicine and literature, (post-)colonial and empire studies, as well as gender studies. In recent years, a main emphasis of her research has been on nineteenth-century cultures of orality (especially lecturing and speech-making) and nineteenth-century mass print cultures (especially periodicals).
She has edited or co-edited more than 10 edited collections and special journal issues, and published close to 70 chapters and articles in edited collections and peer reviewed journals.
Among her ongoing research and publication projects are:
- Early Modern Metropolitan Culture (Shakespeare, early modern city comedy, early modern urban culture; see DFG GRK 'Pre-Modern Metropolitanism' (GRK 2337)
- Victorian Lecture Culture, Victorian Orality
DFG (German Research Foundation) funded project: 'Lecturing Females: Oral Performances, Gender and Sensationalism in Metropolitan Literary and Scientific Institutions and Mass Print Culture, 1860-1910' (ZW 81/8-1; ZW 81/8-2).
The central outcome from this project is the PI's monograph, "Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals and Public Orality, 1870-1910: The First Speech" (The Nineteenth Century Series, London: Routledge, 2025). The DFG supported the research and writing process via a research sabbatical for the PI ('replacement module').
As additional project outcomes, the PI has produced a range of research articles and co-edited two large research and teaching tools - a database (external link, opens in a new window), and a two-volume anthology collecting primary materials.